DIY-TIPPS

The pain

The problem to tackle is the lack of masks.

Why?

Why does the world need lots of masks? Masks can be effective at capturing droplets, which is thought to be the main transmission route of coronavirus, so they should be available for as many people as possible. In addition, the production can’t actually fulfill the demand, which is foreseen to increase even higher in the next months.

What?

Our solution enables any household, even the least connected ones, to handcraft effective equipment with common materials and tools available at home and without need for particular skills, by making building patterns and instructions widely available.

How?

We decided to print instructions and cutting templates on basic goods, such as paper shopping bags.

Challenges we ran into

As we were a very small team without any graphical skills, we had to find people to help us. By simply asking in the help channels, we managed to find reinforcements who appeared to be very experienced and could help us a lot.

From the beginning on, all team members agreed on the fact that we wouldn't be able to dedicate the full 48 hours to the hackathon. So we had to pick up and size a project to make it compatible with the available effort.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We managed to carry out our idea and to deliver it on time. The team spirit was very positive and everyone was bringing his or her competences.

What we learned?

Even if we have been working 100% from home for about 3 weeks, we could improve our "virtual team" capabilities. For that we also discovered efficient tools that the majority of us hadn't used before.